Provenance opportunities for WS-VLAM: An exploration of an e-Science and an e-Business approach

Scientific applications are frequently modeled as a workflow that is executed under the control of a workflow management system. One crucial requirement during the execution is the validation of the generated results and the traceability of the experiment execution path. The automated tracking and storage of provenance information during workflow execution could satisfy this requirement. To collect provenance data using the Grid-enabled scientific workflow management system WS-VLAM, experimentation was made with two different implementations of the provenance concepts. The first one adopts the Open Provenance Model (OPM) as basis to represent, store, and share scientific experiments metadata using the Provenance Layer Infrastructure for e-Science Resources (PLIER). The second one is the history-tracing XML (HisT) which was developed for e-Business provenance. HisT provides a specific model to store provenance data within layered XML documents, whereby each layer is related to one individual workflow task. This paper explores these two provenance models by using an example workflow application and describes how they are integrated into WS-VLAM including implementation details of the provenance architecture. It finally gives a comparison of the two different approaches with a special regard to provenance for human actors